1908 blast dwarfed the power of Hiroshima bomb

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Once upon a time there was dense forest around Tunguska in Siberia but on June
30, 1908, 80 million trees were knocked down like skittles by the
extraordinary shockwave of a meteor.

Tunguska, which packed a force 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb
dropped on Hiroshima, remains the measuring rod of all so-called impact
events. It stokes the anxiety of the Chelyabinsk residents unsure last night
whether their relatively tiny meteor was the harbinger of worse to come. And
it informs Nasa, which compares Tunguska with the possible effect of
Asteroid 2012DA14 should it not bypass Earth again